UCLA Civil and Environmental Engineering

A dynamic field test of a model levee was performed to study the behavior of very soft and compressible peaty organic soils that commonly underlie levees in the Sacramento / San Joaquin Delta in northern California. This first-of-its-kind test applied dynamic loads to the levee/peat system using a large eccentric mass shaker mounted on the levee crest. Loads from the shaker and the inertia of the levee section are transmitted to the peaty organic soils as base shear stresses, and rotational demands that manifest as normal pressures at the embankment/peatinterface. We seek to characterize the transmission of seismic energy between the underlying soft peat and the overlying, comparatively stiff levee fills. A crucial step in the evaluation of the test data is calculation of the amplitude and phase of shaker forces. We compute the centrifugal force from discretely sampled proximity transducer data using a cosine sweep interpolation function.